JONAH GOLDBERG: What ‘War On Women?’

On Friday, the White House announced its “It’s On Us” initiative aimed at combating sexual assaults on college campuses. I’m all in favor of combating sexual assault, but the first priority in combating a problem is understanding it.

That’s not the White House’s first priority. Roughly six weeks before election day, its chief concern is to translate an exciting social media campaign into a get-out-the-vote operation.

Accurate statistics are of limited use in that regard because rape and sexual assault have been declining for decades. So the Obama administration and its allied activist groups trot out the claim that there is a rape epidemic victimizing 1 in 5 women on college campuses. This conveniently horrifying number is a classic example of being too terrible to check. If it were true, it would mean that rape would be more prevalent on elite campuses than in many of the most impoverished and crime-ridden communities.

It comes from tendentious Department of Justice surveys that count “attempted forced kissing” and other potentially caddish acts that even the DOJ admits “are not criminal.”

According to one Justice Department survey, more than half the respondents said they didn’t report the assault because they didn’t think “the incident was serious enough to report.” More than a third said they weren’t clear on whether the incident was a crime. But President Obama uses these surveys to justify using the terms “rape” and “sexual assault” interchangeably.

And yet critics of the alleged rape epidemic are the ones who don’t take rape seriously? I would think conflating a boorish attempt at an undesired kiss with forcible rape is an example of not taking rape seriously.

Well, I’ll think they take rape seriously when they start talking about what women do. And quit firing people for listing well-placed Democrats’ convicted-rapist family members on sex-offender registries.